Every five minutes, about 1,800 new cyber threats are being created, 6,730 records being breached, and more than 800,000 exposures to malicious software and e-mails being recorded globally.
These events are making countries, including the Philippines, highly vulnerable to risks and cyber attacks that may result in huge financial losses for companies, government institutions, and even individuals.
Financial losses from ransomware attacks alone were estimated to have already reached $1 billion this year, according to global cloud security leader Trend Micro.
Countries like the Philippines and Bangladesh recently fell prey to such attacks when hackers attempted to launder money from the latter’s central bank to the Philippines.
Trend Micro chief technology officer Raimund Genes stressed the need for the banking system, identified to be one of the most vulnerable industries to cyber attacks, to establish better safeguards as a group, while the government was urged to implement a more stringent data protection regulation.
Also needed was the harmonization of certain banking standards across the region to make it easier for companies to spot potential cyber threats to the system.
According to Trend Micro, Philippine banks must be equipped with multiple layers of protection internally. Vulnerabilities must be handled and addressed immediately while visibility was deemed important for them to react at the time of the incident.
Apart from employing the necessary software to counter these cyber attacks, Genes stressed the importance of instilling a “cybersecurity mind-set” among employees so they would know how to spot a potential attack.
Six in 10 companies in Asia Pacific consider the “employees’ lack of knowledge” as the main insider threat to cybersecurity, according to a benchmarking survey of management and business executives across 13 countries.
Survey results showed that 86 percent of the respondents bemoaned the lack of skilled cybersecurity professionals, while less than one in 10 companies in the region fully understood how cyber-attacks occurred. Trend Micro also found that nearly half of the companies surveyed did not even have a security awareness program in place.
“Managing and empowering employees with a security-savvy mind-set has to be urgently brought to the top of the corporate agenda,” he said. “People, technology and processes play equally important roles in ensuring the comprehensive security of enterprise networks,” Genes explained.
In the Philippines, companies are equally vulnerable to existing global cyber threats such as ransomware, business e-mail compromise, and targeted attacks.
Observations made by Trend Micro, however, showed that local businesses remained susceptible to “old-school” threats like file infecting viruses, worms that spread through removable drives, among others.
It further disclosed that banking and finance, information technology (IT), manufacturing, transportation, and the government sector were also identified to be among the top most affected by cyber-threats in the country, the company added.